Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, MobileMe
Pingdom posts insight into latest Mobile Me outage
Despite the server-side updates Apple detailed last week, the company's beleaguered Mobile Me service is still problematic for many users. Yesterday, we received a number of e-mails complaining that Apple's Me.com domain was reporting 404 errors. Today, the fine folks at Pingdom.com (which monitors website uptime), posted some details about what was going on.
It appears that there was an issue with the Me.com redirect. If a user directly typed in http://me.com/mail, he or she could successfully access the server. Trying to access the Me.com domain, however, led 404 HTTP error response with the words "Not Found: Resource does not exist," appearing on the page. This outage lasted nearly seven hours, from 2:29 AM EST - 9:25 AM EST on November 3, 2008. Because the outage occurred at night in the continental United States, most affected users were from Europe, where the outage lasted for most of the work day.
If this was a simple redirect error (which it appears to be), why did it take seven hours to fix? My guess is that no one at Apple was alerted to the problem until someone came into work at 6:00 AM PST and started seeing error request e-mails or had problems accessing the domain.
This is a problem. If Apple is truly dedicated to making Mobile Me a service it can be "proud of by the end of this year," the company should really consider having either dedicated 24-hour Mobile Me IT support (or more support) or figure out a way to resolve errors like this in a more timely matter. Redirect errors or glitches are not uncommon, but any company trying to run an international communications service needs to get on the ball.
Despite my vocal misgivings about the service, before it even launched, I signed up for a 60-day trial in early July -- so I could "eat my own dogfood" -- as they say. And even though my service was extended for free until December, I canceled in September. Why? Because the service proved it wasn't reliable enough for any sort of e-mail communication, its calendar syncing was complete junk, and it seemed like every time I tried to access the service, it was either slow as all get out or unavailable. Free or not, that just isn't worth the hassle. At least with Google, it apologizes when it has an outage and if you pay $50 a year, you get actual phone support that doesn't just go to a random Apple Care person with no knowledge or information about the issue.
Are you still a Mobile Me subscriber? Sound off in the comments!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
IanC said 12:37PM on 11-04-2008
Yes i am. Yes theres a few problems, but its not that bad, and certainly not worth bitching about.
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chris said 3:09PM on 11-04-2008
I cancelled after a trial as well. It has been solid enough for day to day usage, but when there are free options that work as goodor in a lot of cases betterwhy pay $100 a year for this service.
I recently summarized what I use in place of Mobile Me:
http://theweeklyreview.ca/2008/10/31/mobile-me-alternatives/
Jash Sayani said 4:05PM on 11-04-2008
@Chris
You're definitely right. Paying $100 every year and facing outages all the time.... GMail is great for Mail, Use Exchange for Calendar and Contacts (Free Mail2Web Live). And Picasa Web Albums for Pics. For storage, there are tons of great services like Box.net, MyDisk.se, GetDropBox, ADrive, Live SkyDrive, OpenDrive, etc....
Will be soon discontinuing my service as well... For Apple to make MobileMe a success, they should give it for free to all Mac owners (1 acc. per serial no.) and reduce prices for Windows/iPhone users.....
Vijay said 6:13PM on 11-04-2008
haha Would be nice. I'm too cheap to pay for MobileMe (or any extra addon for that matter).
+1 for free MobileMe
Jon Mulholland said 7:40PM on 11-04-2008
I'm giving up on it - I wouldn't mind paying for the service, especially with the good level of iPhone and Mac integration, but it has to be reliable.
Aside from the regular outages, push mail to my iPhone hasn't worked reliably , and the web version of the calendar is missing significant features (can't set reminder alerts for example!)
I've gone back to Google for mail and calendar, and am impressed by Dropbox as a free (and excellent) iDisk replacement.
JayDub said 12:42PM on 11-04-2008
I'm a Me-er.... And there are enough hiccups and unreliability issues (and the lack of REAL support) to make this a real downer service. If you're going to have a service and admit that there are big problems with it, you'd better be ready to provide 10/10 service to resolve those problems.
I've been a .Mac subscriber for about five years, and this is pushing me over the edge, away from it. Pretty sad, for an Apple product.
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Nate said 12:44PM on 11-04-2008
I've actually used .Mac for over a year because I needed syncing between my work machine and home machine. When MobileMe launched I had some problems in July but everything has been cleared up since the beginning of August.
I'm actually very, very happy with the calendar, contact, and iDisk syncing. It works fabulously for me and I haven't had a hiccup since July '08. I don't use the email address (google apps user) so I have missed all of that frustration I guess. I'd like to see more applications use it for syncing (Things I'm talking to you).
I also use the photo gallery's to share with family and friends. The best feature is the collaborative albums where people upload pictures to an album and it syncs back to my library. I get more pictures that way than I do with email now. MobileMe is easily worth the $60/year for my use and I'm excited to see what new features are added.
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ars_workerbee said 12:49PM on 11-04-2008
It would be nice if next time you use content from another website, to at least give credit back there.
That icon is from failmeismorelikeit.com, I should know, I made it.
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Christina Warren said 12:55PM on 11-04-2008
Apologies. I sourced the site but our CMS doesn't display something if it is over a certain length of characters and I didn't realize it didn't show up until now. The image is now linked.
Christina Warren said 1:37PM on 11-04-2008
Actually, we just decided to change the image. Again, apologies for the inadvertent link slight.
Bandido said 1:47PM on 11-04-2008
@ ars_workerbee - Most people would consider that an alteration, the 1% of the icon you changed doesn't give you rights to call it a creation, and getting butt hurt about it....nice article Christina.
Nick said 12:49PM on 11-04-2008
Still having problems with it. Canceling my trial membership soon.
But the good (great!) news is that it's now possible to sync Google Calendar and Contacts to the iPhone (check out nuevasync.com). Better luck next time, MobileMeh.
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John Wilker said 12:54PM on 11-04-2008
I've found that routinely stopping syncing, and restarting it across my three synced computers often helps Mobile Me keep trucking. My latest headache is iDisk. I have a family acct and put a bunch in shared. Now my Macbook Air says that the "shared" alias is broken. Great, that content is now unavailable to this machine until it's fixed. LAME.
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jonathan said 1:02PM on 11-04-2008
the web service still stinks. but i dont use that enough to really have to complain. i use it more for the iphone syncing, and that works no problem for me. i get all my contacts and calendar syncs with address book and ical, and i really have no qualms with that portion. i get all my emails pushed, and dont think i can really recall a time that it was down and bothered me. i dont think i've ever really experienced downtime....only on the me.com domain.
sometimes i WILL use the web service and it wont let me send an email or the addresses in my contact list wont populate until i actual view my address book...then i can type a new email and the drop down list will autofill....but thats just not that big of a deal to me. the iphone portion works great for me...so i'm fine with it...for now
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Factoid Junkie said 2:25PM on 11-04-2008
My patience is wearing thin as well. I still cannot upload zip files larger than 250 megs and frankly don't understand why I can't just upload any file under the 1 gig limit without compression anyway. Regardless, this latest outage caused me a bit of business pain.
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Michael said 1:02PM on 11-04-2008
Maybe kinda relates to the "Apple store down" post a few below...Why do they have to shutdown their e-commerce site to make small changes?
If anybody else had to shutdown their site to simply add products and change a few things, they'd get horrible press, rather than "ooh, what might be coming!" press. Apple's Magic at work :)
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AB said 1:20PM on 11-04-2008
I've had a total of ZERO problems with me.com since the original issues were resolved. I'm pleased with the service and it meets all my needs for a service such as this. I even upgraded to a family account so that others in my household could enjoy the functionality.
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Brian said 1:13PM on 11-04-2008
If mobileme was free, there would certainly be less bitching.
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Eric said 1:19PM on 11-04-2008
I hope we get another extension... My 30-day trial from June is almost up!
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John said 1:25PM on 11-04-2008
I have been using a .mac account for over a year. Back in April I renewed it again however I doubt I will do the same when it comes time to renew again. I had high hopes but find that often the service is down or very slow. iDisk is a complete waste. It takes forever to upload and download, that is, when I can actually connect to it. Looks like I should make a gmail account and set it up to sync to my iphone instead of using mobileme. I also hate how they refer to it as Me. That is what everyone referred to Windows Millenium as, and we all know (well most of us) how much of a failure that was. I think mobileme is a few years away from being perfected.
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